David Bowie - obituary

11 January 2016 • 12:56pm

David Bowie, who has died of cancer a few days after turning 69, was a rock musician of rare originality and talent; he was also, variously, a producer, painter, film actor, art critic, the progenitor of bisexual chic, a family man and an astute multi-millionaire.

Endlessly manipulating his public identity, Bowie was once rumoured to be an alien from outer space, and suggested in the mid-1970s that Britain needed a fascist prime minister. “I am an actor,” he said. “My whole professional life is an act.”

Although he drew heavily on other artists for his inspiration, he had a wealth of new ideas of his own and wrote some of the most quirky and poignant songs of the 1970s and 1980s: Space Oddity, Changes, Fame, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and Aladdin Sane.

Jangling and melancholy, his music matched imagistic lyrics with his rich, British-accented singing style and tunes that owed as much to white opera as to black soul, and to the simple pop of the Beatles as to the drugged edginess of the Velvet Underground.

David Bowie in July 1973 is seen off at the station by his first wife Angie. They married in 1970 and divorced 10 years laterCredit:
Smith/Express/Getty Images

He was frank about the synthetic quality of much of his work. “I’m really knocked out that people actually dance to my records,” he said. “Let’s be honest; my rhythm and blues are thoroughly plastic.”

He had a protean personality to match. A supermodel before the era of supermodels, Bowie was eel-thin with the face of a starved child and the teeth of a pike. He certainly looked like a changeling or alien, and had an extraordinary left eye, green with a dilated pupil; and rumours, which he did not discourage, spread that it was a sign of his extraterrestrial origins.

Bowie's childhood friend George Underwood punched him in the left eye during an an argument over a girlCredit:
GETTY IMAGES

It was in fact an injury sustained in a playground scuffle in the days when he was plain David Jones from Bromley, south London.

In the early 1970s he played upon the science fiction theme, creating the persona of Ziggy Stardust, a rock star from outer space whose music drove audiences to kill and himself to suicide. The character was a loose tribute to Vince Taylor, an early rock 'n’ roll singer and friend of Bowie’s who had gone mad. The album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars (1972) was accompanied by a stage show for which Bowie dyed his hair orange, painted his face white and donned a multicoloured jumpsuit while his backing group, The Spiders, dressed in gold lamé.

David Bowie in 1973 Credit:
Rex Features

This was no more than glam rock, perhaps; but the weird aura around Bowie was boosted by his role as a marooned alien in Nicolas Roeg’s film, The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), and even after he ditched science-fiction, his subsequent pronouncements continued to smack of other-worldliness.

In the mid-1970s, when he had metamorphosed into the Thin White Duke, a combination of Nietzschean superman and degenerate European aristocrat, Bowie offered his services to the nation. “There is no politician like me,” he observed. “As I see it, I am the only alternative for premier in England. Britain would benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism.”

His nationalism had roots in the occult, of which he had become a devotee. (He said that his 1976 album, Station to Station, was a trip through the Kabbala; like many of his intellectual touches, this went unobserved by his fans.) “As King Arthur of England,” said the Thin White Duke, “I guarded the Divine Articles of Joseph of Arimathea. I will be Xeros, Emperor of Isolar and last existing antibody from Reality to survive the Metabloc War 'A’ in which neutrons will bombard and implode within our perceived solar system. I will be very lonely.”

It was difficult to know how much Bowie believed in what he said, since one of his main preoccupations was to provoke. Many of his lyrics, and thoughts, owed their composition to the “cut-up” techniques of the junkie poet William Burroughs. Another object of admiration was Andy Warhol, the doyen of the New York avant-garde, for whom he wrote a song:

Bowie had for many years a passionate interest in Warhol. He secured an introduction to him in 1971, when he visited the Factory, and played Warhol his tribute. Warhol was upset by the lines: “He’ll think about paint and he’ll think about glue/What a jolly boring thing to do” – and left the room, returning only to kneel and take a photograph of Bowie’s yellow shoes. Bowie never again penetrated the inner circle.

Drugs made a significant contribution to his creative output. “I did nearly kill myself a number of times,” recalled Bowie. “Once I blew my nose and half my brain fell out.” In the late 1970s his cocaine habit was so bad that he took himself off to hide in Berlin. There he could be found in cafés, banging his head on the table and saying: “Please help me.” The Thin White Duke was very lonely indeed.

David Bowie Credit:
GETTY

Latterly, when he was, in the words of Noel Gallagher, “an old git”, Bowie mellowed into an affable, discursive teetotaller. His consumption of cigarettes was vast, but his only other excess took the form of intellectual name-dropping and a liking for bewildering obfuscation. Talking about his work (from 1988) with his own rock group Tin Machine – a lurch into heavy guitar and pounding drums that coincided with the growth of “grunge” – he said: “That hard-lined Apollonian thing around me had broken down and I was cosmically disorganised.”

His enthusiasm for the occult was replaced by a somewhat pompous scepticism. After going on a tour of Arthurian Britain, he observed of Tintagel’s connection with the legends: “It’s a good myth, but groundless, I suspect, because Tintagel was too late to have been Arthurian.”

He joined the board of the art magazine Modern Painters, for which he wrote himself, and began to develop a critic’s eye for trends. “There’s a big Post-Modernist shake-up,” he noted. “I think the emphasis on narrative form in song is going to disappear completely and that will be replaced by visual form. It has a lot to do with the rise of the Post-Modernist trend; but I suppose it’s a more defined version of Sartre’s existentialism.”

Although he was latterly a happy man, the best of Bowie’s music always had a cold, alienated quality with which the young identified. Despite his posing and horseplay, there was a great deal of genuine fear in his music, reflecting the strain of madness in his family and his shock at the suicide of his half-brother, Terry, who had schizophrenia and for whom he wrote the song Five Years.

Bowie himself suggested that it was through invoking a multiplicity of personalities that he could stay one step ahead of madness; by being madder than mad, he would escape being himself, who was insane.

David Bowie (circled) as a pupil at Burnt Ash Primary School in Bromley Credit:
Burnt Ash PS/SWNS

David Robert Jones was born at Brixton on January 8 1947. In early interviews he played up the brutality of his upbringing – the rough streets “like Harlem”, brawls, his drunken, gambling father and his “nutty” family who, he claimed, were “all illegitimate”.

It was not as bad as that. When he was a child the family moved to suburban Bromley, and his upbringing was dull rather than dangerous. He studied commercial drawing at Bromley Technical College, but was taken with the lifestyle evoked in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and resolved to drop out to “become a superman”.

After toying with the idea of becoming a Buddhist monk – as a teenager he studied under Chime Rinpoche, one of the first Tibetan lamas to come to Britain – he set his heart on rock music, learnt the saxophone and put his first bands together: David (or Davie) Jones and the Lower Third, David Bowie and the Buzz. He also trained in mime under Lindsay Kemp, establishing a troupe called Feathers.

David Jones in 1964

At the time he was living with his parents but he soon moved as a lodger into a flat owned by Mary Finnigan, a journalist, in Foxgrove Road, Beckenham. She introduced herself with: “I’m Mary. Would you like a cup of tea and some tincture of cannabis?” The two became lovers and set up an “arts lab” at the Three Tuns pub. According to her book Psychedelic Suburbia (2016), their relationship ended after he began seeing (among others) Angela “Angie” Barnett, an American model whom he would later marry.

“Angela and I knew each other because we were both going out with the same man,” he recalled. It was through Angie that he secured his first record deal. She cajoled another boyfriend who worked for Mercury records into signing up Bowie.

One of his early singles, released in 1967, was a humorous Anthony Newley pastiche called The Laughing Gnome, which was later a source of mild embarrassment to Bowie. His first No 1 was Space Oddity in 1969, a melancholy poem about an astronaut who decides to stay in orbit. It was popular with teenagers, many of whom were to remain fans of Bowie for life.

The cover of Bowie's Space Oddity, released in 1969

“On stage he is quite devastatingly beautiful,” wrote an American critic at an early concert. “With his loofah hair and blue eyes, he pads around like every schoolgirl’s wonder movie star. He smiles; you melt. He winks; you disintegrate.”

His first album, David Bowie (1967), was uncharacteristic and in the Anthony Newley vein of music-hall whimsy; it was the 1969 release, also called David Bowie and soon retitled Space Oddity, which many enthusiasts considered the first “proper” Bowie album.

His next record, The Man Who Sold The World (1970), had a sleeve for its British version on which Bowie posed in woman’s clothing in a parody of a Rossetti portrait. The reference was lost on the critics, who fixed on Bowie’s ambiguous sexuality. “I said, 'fine’,” he recalled. “I’ll do anything to break me through.” The album’s supernatural tone and fragmented content earned Bowie a reputation as a “dangerous loony”.

Bowie’s relatively few hit singles were tasters for his albums, which were in themselves only a part of whatever persona he was investigating at the time. This was quickly understood by a core of devoted fans, who collected each album and adopted each persona as they might have bought the clothes of a favourite designer.

After The Man Who Sold the World, Bowie produced the more tuneful Hunky Dory (1971), which contained Changes, an enduring, catchy reflection on time and ageing, consistent themes in his work and appropriate for a decade as clapped-out as the 1970s. This was followed by Ziggy Stardust in 1972, then, the next year, Aladdin Sane (a pun on the madness he feared) and Pin Ups.

On the cover of Diamond Dogs (1974) Bowie appeared as half-man, half-whippet. The album was a vision of urban apocalypse and was promoted with an extravagant stage show with $200,000 of lighting effects. “It’s all so negative, your s---,” observed his friend John Lennon. “All this Diamond Dogs mutant crap.”

Angie and David Bowie with their son Zowie in 1974

For the stage show to accompany Station to Station (1976), Bowie included a showing of Luis Bunuel’s surrealist film Un Chien Andalou and a taped performance of the German robot-rock band Kraftwerk. Otherwise, the Thin White Duke was alone on stage, singing snatches of Brecht and some of his own classics, such as Jean Genie and Suffragette City.

In the latter half of the 1970s Bowie was all but destroyed by cocaine, but he found time for a peculiar appearance on Bing Crosby’s 1977 Christmas show to perform a duet (Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy) which became a huge hit.

He settled in Berlin towards the end of 1976, and from that period emerged three sombre, paranoid albums: Heroes, Low (both 1977) and Lodger (1979). Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) the following year (“Scary monsters and super creeps/ keep me running/ running scared”) produced a British No 1 single (and groundbreaking pop video) in Ashes to Ashes. After that he pulled himself back from the brink and moved to Switzerland in 1981. There he learnt to ski and masterminded a comeback with Let’s Dance (1983), posing as a grim-faced Yuppie-bopper.

The album sold six million copies. This depressed him, as did the success of the Serious Moonlight tour; he was expected to end his days as a disco diva. There were more No 1 singles, upbeat and poppy, during that decade: Under Pressure, with Queen, Let’s Dance, and Dancing in the Streets with Mick Jagger. With his financial future assured, he finally broke with his adolescent desire to be a rock-suicide and instead set off in new, perverse directions, “moving into areas I feel uncomfortable in”, collaborating with the musician Brian Eno, employing new computer technology to “randomise” his writing, and spending more time painting and acting.

Bowie as Andy Warhol with Jeffrey Wright in the 1996 movie Basquiat

He had an exhibition of his Gauguin-esque paintings in London in 1995, and earned praise for his performances in such films as The Hunger, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (both 1983) and Basquiat (1996), in which he revenged himself on Andy Warhol, giving a squeaky, mincing performance as the artist.

In later years, although the gaps between albums and tours became longer, the appetite for musical experimentation was re-invigorated; adventurous albums such as Heathen (2002), delightfully offbeat and with a characteristic smattering of baffling lyrics, showed that he was uninterested in the conservative late-career reputation-consolidation favoured by other rock grandees.

He released several accomplished singles during this period: Everybody Says Hi, from Heathen, ruefully contemplated his son’s growing up, and (10 years later) Where Are We Now? from the album The Next Day (2013) – elegiac, witty and with an amusing accompanying video – which was acclaimed by Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph as “the most surprising, perfect and welcome comeback in rock history”.

Always curious about what other musicians were doing, in 2013 Bowie recorded guest vocals on the song Reflektor by the Canadian band Arcade Fire, and for his final, genre-mixing album, Blackstar (2016), he was accompanied by a New York jazz group he had discovered.

A major development in David Bowie’s life was the priority he gave to his friendships. “I remember to phone them up,” he said. With age he also stopped worrying about his identity and was satisfied that his interests were challenging and his appetites “sane ones”.

A major factor in his happiness was his separation from Angie Bowie, whom he had married in 1970. Their wedding was immediately preceded by a “three-in-a-bed-romp”; and in her kiss-and-tell memoirs, Backstage Passes (1993), Angie Bowie alleged that both of them had enjoyed a string of lovers of both sexes and that she had once discovered her husband in bed with Mick Jagger. They had an acrimonious divorce and it was said that they never spoke again.

After a bitter custody battle, Bowie won custody of his son, Zowie, whom he sent to Gordonstoun – where the boy changed his name to Joe; he is now the acclaimed film director Duncan Jones.

David Bowie and Iman in 2011 Credit:
Rex Features

Bowie married secondly, in 1992, Iman Abdulmajid, a Somalian-born former model who ran a successful cosmetics business. In a telling acknowledgement of changed priorities, the wedding was celebrated with a few friends, and a handful of photographers from Hello! magazine.

He is survived by his wife, their daughter Alexandria, and his son Duncan Jones.